The peace of Brétigny brought no repose to the kingdom. War having
become a congenial and very lucrative industry, its cessation caused
want of work, with all the evils that entails. For ten years the
remnants of the armies of England, Navarre and Brittany--the "Grandes
Compagnies," as they were called--ravaged the country; although Charles
V., "_durement subtil et sage_," succeeded in getting rid of them,
thanks to du Guesclin, one of their chiefs, who led them to any place
where fighting was going on--to Brittany, Alsace, Spain. Charles also
had all towns and large villages fortified; and being a man of affairs
he set about undoing the effect of the treaty of Brétigny by alliances
with Flanders, whose heiress he married to his brother Philip, duke of
Burgundy; with Henry, king of Castile, and Ferdinand of Portugal, who
possessed fine navies; and, finally, with the emperor Charles IV.
Financial and military preparations were made no less seriously when the
harsh administration of the Black Prince, to whom Edward III. had given
Guienne in fief, provoked the nobles of Gascony to complain to Charles
V. Cited before the court of Paris, the Black Prince refused to attend,
and war broke out in Gascony, Poitou and Normandy, but with fresh
tactics (1369). Whilst the English adhered to the system of wide
circuits, under Chandos or Robert Knolles, Charles V. limited himself to
defending the towns and exhausting the enemy without taking dangerous
risks. Thanks to the prudent constable du Guesclin, sitting quietly at
home he reconquered bit by bit what his predecessors had lost upon the
battlefield, helm on head and sword in hand; and when he died in 1380,
after the decease of both Edward III. and the Black Prince, the only
possessions of England in a liberated but ruined France were Bayonne,
Bordeaux, Brest, Cherbourg and Calais.
Charles VI. (1380-1422).
The king's uncles and the Marmousets.
The revolt of the Maillotins.
The death of Charles V. and dynastic revolutions in England stopped the
war for thirty-five years. Then began an era of internal disorder and
misery. The men of that period, coarse, violent and simple-minded, with
few political ideas, loved brutal and noisy pleasures--witness the
incredible festivities at the marriage of Charles VI., and the
assassinations of the constable de Clisson, the duke of Orleans and John
the Fearless. It would have needed an energetic hand to hold these
passions in check; and Charles VI. was a gentle-natured child, twelve
years of age, who attained his majority only to fall into a second
childhood. Thence arose a question which remained without reply during
the whole of his reign. Who should have possession of the royal person,
and, consequently, of the royal power? Should it be the uncles of the
king, or his followers Clisson and Bureau de la Rivière, whom the nobles
called in mockery the _Marmousets_? His uncles first seized the
government, each with a view to his own particular interests, which were
by no means those of the kingdom at large. The duke of Anjou emptied the
treasury in conquering the kingdom of Naples, at the call of Queen
Joanna of Sicily. The duke of Berry seized upon Languedoc and the
wine-tax. The duke of Burgundy, heir through his wife to the countship
of Flanders, wanted to crush the democratic risings among the Flemings.
Each of them needed money, but Charles V., pricked by conscience on his
death-bed, forbade the levying of the hearth-tax (1380). His brother's
attempt to re-establish it set Paris in revolt. The _Maillotins_ of
Paris found imitators in other great towns; and in Auvergne and Vivarais
the _Tuchins_ renewed the Jacquerie. Revolutionary attempts between 1380
and 1385 to abolish all taxes were echoed in England, Florence and
Flanders. These isolated rebellions, however, were crushed by the
ever-ready coalition of royal and feudal forces at Roosebeke (1382).
Taxes and subsidies were maintained and the hearth-money re-established.
Madness of Charles VI.
The death of the duke of Anjou at Bari (1384) gave preponderant
influence to Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, who increased the large
and fruitless expenses of his Burgundian policy to such a point that on
the return of a last unfortunate expedition into Gelderland Charles VI.,
who had been made by him to marry Isabel of Bavaria, took the government
from his uncles on the 3rd of May 1389, and recalled the _Marmousets_.
But this young king, aged only twenty, very much in love with his young
wife and excessively fond of pleasure, soon wrecked the delicate poise
of his mental faculties in the festivities of the Hôtel Saint-Paul; and
a violent attack of Pierre de Craon on the constable de Clisson having
led to an expedition against his accomplice, the duke of Brittany,
Charles was seized by insanity on the road. The _Marmousets_ were
deposed, the king's brother, the duke of Orleans, set aside, and the old
condition of affairs began again (1392).
Struggle between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians.
The struggle was now between the two branches of the royal family, the
Orleanist and the Burgundian, between the aristocratic south and the
democratic north; while the deposition of Richard II. of England in
favour of Henry of Lancaster permitted them to vary civil war by war
against the foreigner. Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, the king's
uncle, had certain advantages over his rival Louis of Orleans, Charles
VI.'s brother: superiority in age, relations with the Lancastrians and
with Germany, and territorial wealth and power. The two adversaries had
each the same scheme of government: each wanted to take charge of
Charles VI., who was intermittently insane, and to exclude his rival
from the pillage of the royal exchequer; but this rivalry of desires
brought them into opposition on all the great questions of the day--the
war with England, the Great Schism and the imperial election. The
struggle became acute when John the Fearless of Burgundy succeeded his
father in 1404. Up to this time the queen, Isabel of Bavaria, had been
held in a kind of dependency upon Philip of Burgundy, who had brought
about her marriage; but less eager for influence than for money, since
political questions were unintelligible to her and her situation was a
precarious one, she suddenly became favourable to the duke of Orleans.
Whether due to passion or caprice this cost the duke his life, for John
the Fearless had him assassinated in 1407, and thus let loose against
one another the Burgundians and the Armagnacs, so-called because the son
of the murdered duke was the son-in-law of the count of Armagnac (see
ARMAGNAC). Despite all attempts at reconciliation the country was
divided into two parties. Paris, with her tradesmen--the butchers in
particular--and her university, played an important part in this
quarrel; for to be master of Paris was to be master of the king. In 1413
the duke of Burgundy gained the upper hand there, partly owing to the
rising of the _Cabochiens_, i.e. the butchers led by the skinner Simon
Caboche, partly to the hostility of the university to the Avignon pope
and partly to the Parisian bourgeoisie.
The Ordonnance Cabochienne, 1413.
Amid this reign of terror and of revolt the university, the only moral
and intellectual force, taking the place of the impotent states-general
and of a parlement carefully restricted to the judiciary sphere, vainly
tried to re-establish a firm monarchical system by means of the
_Ordonnance Cabochienne_; but this had no effect, the government being
now at the mercy of the mob, themselves at the mercy of incapable
hot-headed leaders. The struggle ended in becoming one between factions
of the townsmen, led respectively by the _hûchier_ Cirasse and by Jean
Caboche. The former overwhelmed John the Fearless, who fled from Paris;
and the Armagnacs, re-entering on his exit, substituted white terror for
red terror, from the 12th of December 1413 to the 28th of July 1414. The
butchers' organization was suppressed and all hope of reform lost. Such
disorders allowed Henry V. of England to take the offensive again.
Agincourt.
The Armagnacs were in possession of Paris and the king when Henry V.
crushed them at Agincourt on the 25th of October 1415. It was as at
Crécy and Poitiers; the French chivalry, accustomed to mere playing at
battle in the tourneys, no longer knew how to fight. Charles of Orleans
being a captive and his father-in-law, the count of Armagnac, highly
unpopular, John the Fearless, hitherto prudently neutral, re-entered
Paris, amid scenes of carnage, on the invitation of the citizen Perrinet
le Clerc.
The Treaty of Troyes, 1420.
Secure from interference, Henry V. had occupied the whole of Normandy
and destroyed in two years the work of Philip Augustus. The duke of
Burgundy, feeling as incapable of coming to an understanding with the
masterful Englishman as of resisting him unaided, tried to effect a
reconciliation with the Armagnacs, who had with them the heir to the
throne, the dauphin Charles; but his assassination at Montereau in 1419
nearly caused the destruction of the kingdom, the whole Burgundian party
going over to the side of the English. By the treaty of Troyes (1420)
the son of John the Fearless, Philip the Good, in order to avenge his
father recognized Henry V. (now married to Catherine, Charles VI.'s
daughter) as heir to the crown of France, to the detriment of the
dauphin Charles, who was disavowed by his mother and called in derision
"the soi-disant dauphin of Viennois." When Henry V. and Charles VI. died
in 1422, Henry VI.--son of Henry V. and Catherine--was proclaimed at
Paris king of France and of England, with the concurrence of Philip the
Good, duke of Burgundy. Thus in 1428 the English occupied all eastern
and northern France, as far as the Loire; while the two most important
civil powers of the time, the parlement and the university of Paris, had
acknowledged the English king.
Charles VII. (1422-1461).
But the cause of greatest weakness to the French party was still Charles
VII. himself, the king of Bourges. This youth of nineteen, the
ill-omened son of a madman and of a Bavarian of loose morals, was a
symbol of France, timorous and mistrustful. The châteaux of the Loire,
where he led a restless and enervating existence, held an atmosphere
little favourable to enthusiasm and energy. After his victories at
Cravant (1423) and Verneuil (1424), the duke of Bedford, appointed
regent of the kingdom, had given Charles VII. four years' respite, and
these had been occupied in violent intrigues between the constable de
Richemont[30] and the sire de la Trémoille, the young king's favourites,
and solely desirous of enriching themselves at his expense. The king,
melancholy spectacle as he was, seemed indeed to suit that tragic hour
when Orleans, the last bulwark of the south, was besieged by the earl of
Salisbury, now roused from inactivity (1428). He had neither taste nor
capacity like Philip VI. or John the Good for undertaking "belles
apertises d'armes"; but then a lack of chivalry combined with a
temporizing policy had not been particularly unsuccessful in the case of
his grandfather Charles V.
Joan of Arc.
Powerful aid now came from an unexpected quarter. The war had been long
and cruel, and each successive year naturally increased feeling against
the English. The damage done to Burgundian interests by the harsh yet
impotent government of Bedford, disgust at the iniquitous treaty of
Troyes, the monarchist loyalty of many of the warriors, the still deeper
sentiment felt by men like Alain Chartier towards "Dame France," and the
"great misery that there was in the kingdom of France"; all these
suddenly became incarnate in the person of Joan of Arc, a young peasant
of Domrémy in Lorraine. Determined in her faith and proud in her
meekness, in opposition to the timid counsels of the military leaders,
to the interested delays of the courtiers, to the scruples of the
experts and the quarrelling of the doctors, she quoted her "voices," who
had, she said, commissioned her to raise the siege of Orleans and to
conduct the gentle dauphin to Reims, there to be crowned. Her sublime
folly turned out to be wiser than their wisdom; in two months, from May
to July 1429, she had freed Orleans, destroyed the prestige of the
English army at Patay, and dragged the doubting and passive king against
his will to be crowned at Reims. All this produced a marvellous
revulsion of political feeling throughout France, Charles VII. now
becoming incontestably "him to whom the kingdom of France ought to
belong." After Reims Joan's first thought was for Paris, and to achieve
the final overthrow of the English; while Charles VII. was already
sighing for the easy life of Touraine, and recurring to that policy of
truce which was so strongly urged by his counsellors, and so keenly
irritating to the clear-sighted Joan of Arc. A check before Paris
allowed the jealousy of La Trémoille to waste the heroine for eight
months on operations of secondary importance, until the day when she was
captured by the Burgundians under the walls of Compiègne, and sold by
them to the English. The latter incontinently prosecuted her as a
heretic; they had, indeed, a great interest in seeing her condemned by
the Church, which would render her conquests sacrilegious. After a
scandalous four months' duel between this simple innocent girl and a
tribunal of crafty malevolent ecclesiastics and doctors of the
university of Paris, Joan was burned alive in the old market-place of
Rouen, on the 30th of May 1431 (see JOAN OF ARC).
On Charles VII.'s part this meant oblivion and silence until the day
when in 1450, more for his own sake than for hers, he caused her memory
to be rehabilitated; but Joan had given the country new life and heart.
From 1431 to 1454 the struggle against the English went on
energetically; and the king, relieved in 1433 of his evil genius, La
Trémoille, then became a man once more, playing a kingly part under the
guidance of Dunois, Richemont, La Hire and Saintrailles, leaders of
worth on the field of battle. Moreover, the English territory, a great
triangle, with the Channel for base and Paris for apex, was not a really
solid position. Yet the war seemed interminable; until at last Philip of
Burgundy, for long embarrassed by his English alliance, decided in 1435
to become reconciled with Charles VII. This was in consequence of the
death of his sister, who had been married to Bedford, and the return of
his brother-in-law Richemont into the French king's favour. The treaty
of Arras, which made him a sovereign prince for life, though harsh, at
all events gave a united France the opportunity of expelling the English
from the east, and allowed the king to re-enter Paris in 1436. From 1436
to 1439 there was a terrible repetition of what happened after the Peace
of Brétigny; famine, pestilence, extortions and, later, the aristocratic
revolt of the Praguerie, completed the ruin of the country. But thanks
to the permanent tax of the _taille_ during this time of truce Charles
VII. was able to effect the great military reform of the Compagnies
d'Ordonnance, of the Francs-Archers, and of the artillery of the
brothers Bureau. From this time forward the English, ruined, demoralized
and weakened both by the death of the duke of Bedford and the beginnings
of the Wars of the Roses, continued to lose territory on every
recurrence of conflict. Normandy was lost to them at Formigny (1450),
and Guienne, English since the 12th century, at Castillon (1453). They
kept only Calais; and now it was their turn to have a madman, Henry VI.,
for king.
Consequences of the Hundred Years' War.
France issued from the Hundred Years' War victorious, but terribly
ruined and depopulated. It is true she had definitely freed her
territory from the stranger, and through the sorrows of defeat and the
menace of disruption had fortified her national solidarity, and defined
her patriotism, still involved in and not yet dissociated from loyalty
to the monarchy. A happy awakening, although it went too far in
establishing royal absolutism; and a victory too complete, in that it
enervated all the forces of resistance. The nation, worn out by the long
disorders consequent on the captivity of King John and the insanity of
Charles VI., abandoned itself to the joys of peace. Preferring the solid
advantage of orderly life to an unstable liberty, it acquiesced in the
abdication of 1439, when the States consented to taxation for the
support of a permanent army without any periodical renewal of their
authorization. No doubt by the prohibition to levy the smallest _taille_
the feudal lords escaped direct taxation; but from the day when the
privileged classes selfishly allowed the taxing of the third estate,
provided that they themselves were exempt, they opened the door to
monarchic absolutism. The principle of autocracy triumphed everywhere
over the remnants of local or provincial authority, in the sphere of
industry as in that of administration; while the gild system became
much more rigid. A loyal bureaucracy, far more powerful than the phantom
administration of Bourges or of Poitiers, gradually took the place of
the court nobility; and thanks to this the institutions of control which
the war had called into power--the provincial states-general--were
nipped in the bud, withered by the people's poverty of political idea
and by the blind worship of royalty. Without the nation's concurrence
the king's creatures were now to endow royalty with all the organs
necessary for the exertion of authority; by which imprudent compliance,
and above all thanks to Jacques Coeur (q.v.), the financial independence
of the provinces disappeared little by little, and all the public
revenues were left at the discretion of the king alone (1436-1440). By
this means, too, and chiefly owing to the constable de Richemont and the
brothers Bureau, the first permanent royal army was established (1445).
Monarchical centralization.
Henceforward royalty, strengthened by victory and organized for the
struggle, was able to reduce the centrifugal social forces to impotence.
The parlement of Paris saw its monopoly encroached upon by the court of
Toulouse in 1443, and by the parlement of Grenoble in 1453. The
university of Paris, compromised with the English, like the parlement,
witnessed the institution and growth of privileged provincial
universities. The Church of France was isolated from the papacy by the
Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438) only to be exploited and enslaved
by royalty. Monarchic centralization, interrupted for the moment by the
war, took up with fresh vigour its attacks upon urban liberties,
especially in the always more independent south. It caused a slackening
of that spirit of communal initiative which had awakened in the midst of
unprecedented disasters. The decimated and impoverished nobility proved
their impotence in the coalitions they attempted between 1437 and 1442,
of which the most important, the Praguerie, fell to pieces almost
directly, despite the support of the dauphin himself.
Social life.
The life of society, now alarmingly unstable and ruthlessly cruel, was
symbolized by the _danse macabre_ painted on the walls of the
cemeteries; the sombre and tragic art of the 15th century, having lost
the fine balance shown by that of the 13th, gave expression in its
mournful realism to the general state of exhaustion. The favourite
subject of the mysteries and of other artistic manifestations was no
longer the triumphant Christ of the middle ages, nor the smiling and
teaching Christ of the 13th century, but the Man of sorrows and of
death, the naked bleeding Jesus, lying on the knees of his mother or
crowned with thorns. France, like the Christ, had known all the
bitterness and weakness of a Passion.
The war of independence over, after a century of fatigue, regrets and
doubts, royalty and the nation, now more united and more certain of each
other, resumed the methodic and utilitarian war of widening boundaries.
Leaving dreams about crusades to the poets, and to a papacy delivered
from schism, Charles VII. turned his attention to the ancient appanage
of Lothair, Alsace and Lorraine, those lands of the north and the east
whose frontiers were constantly changing, and which seemed to invite
aggression. But the chance of annexing them without great trouble was
lost; by the fatal custom of appanages the Valois had set up again those
feudal institutions which the Capets had found such difficulty in
destroying, and Louis XI. was to make sad experience of this.
The House of Burgundy.
To the north and east of the kingdom extended a wide territory of
uncertain limits; countries without a chief like Alsace; principalities
like Lorraine, ecclesiastical lordships like the bishopric of Liége;
and, most important of all, a royal appanage, that of the duchy of
Burgundy, which dated back to the time of John the Good. Through
marriages, conquests and inheritance, the dukes of Burgundy had
enormously increased their influence; while during the Hundred Years'
War they had benefited alternately by their criminal alliance with the
English and by their self-interested reconciliation with their
sovereign. They soon appeared the most formidable among the new feudal
chiefs so imprudently called into being by Louis XI.'s predecessors.
Fleeing from the paternal wrath which he had drawn down upon himself by
his ambition and by his unauthorized marriage with Charlotte of Savoy,
the future Louis XI. had passed five years of voluntary exile at the
court of the chief of the House of Burgundy, Philip the Good; and he was
able to appreciate the territorial power of a duchy which extended from
the Zuyder Zee to the Somme, with all the country between the Saône and
the Loire in addition, and its geographical position as a commercial
intermediary between Germany, England and France. He had traversed the
fertile country of Flanders; he had visited the rich commercial and
industrial republics of Bruges and Ghent, which had escaped the
disasters of the Hundred Years' War; and, finally, he had enjoyed a
hospitality as princely as it was self-interested at Brussels and at
Dijon, the two capitals, where he had seen the brilliancy of a court
unique in Europe for the ideal of chivalric life it offered.